Word Independent Model for Syllable Stress Evaluation

Analyzing syllable stress in spoken English has been an area of research for a long time. In this paper, we analyze the performance of a novel method for evaluating syllable stress in spoken English. Specifically, we study the problem of determining if a word is spoken with the correct syllable stress pattern. The proposed method uses generalized models for stressed and unstressed syllables to analyze the constituent syllables of a word and determines if the word is spoken correctly. The performance of the proposed method is reported in terms of classification results on human labeled word utterances and it is compared with that of the word-dependent models using various classifiers.